


Where the Lethe Meets the Rubicon

by Megan



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Canon - Manga, Community: kink_bingo, Gen, Jossed, Medical, POV Character of Color, Post-Canon, Speculation, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-07
Updated: 2010-06-07
Packaged: 2017-10-09 23:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/92727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megan/pseuds/Megan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kanda just might be losing his mind. Now, if only it would go a little faster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where the Lethe Meets the Rubicon

**Author's Note:**

> So, when the volume twenty cover was released and Kanda's tattoo was nowhere to be seen, I said "HMMM. It's probably artist laziness, but what if..."
> 
> Ostensibly for the medical kink square of my Kink Bingo card, but this is more about the character being triggered than it actually is about the kink. This will make no sense if you haven't read all the way through 195 (as of this writing, the most recent chapter), and the warnings are... well, complicated. I waffled for awhile about putting a non-con warning on here, since the crux of the story is the in-character triggering, but in the end I didn't.

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Someone's trying to drive him insane with the noise, and he can't even get up to figure out what it _is_; after some half-conscious incident he can't really remember, they had strapped him down. It's just like old times in the worst fucking possible way, tied down in a room bare of everything except arcane medical equipment that looks like it should belong in a torture chamber and not a hospital. Not that there's really much difference between the two, other than the fact that the torturer's at least honest about it (none of those stupid lies about how _it's for your own good_ or _this will be over soon_ or _just go to sleep and you'll feel better_ when what they really mean is _this is for our own good_ and _this will never be over_ and _we're going to put you down like a dog_).

It's scarier at nineteen than it had been at eight, somehow. He's bigger and stronger than most of the people who are doing this to him now. He's supposed to be able to say no and people are supposed to listen because that's what being an adult means. Before he had just been young; now he's powerless, right where they want him not because he's a child but because he's too weak to stop it. And now he doesn't know what's going to happen; at least back then he had known to expect to _die_.

"How are you feeling?" Epstein asks him, because she is a hateful, disgusting excuse for a person and if there were any justice in the world at all Alma would have gotten his revenge on her. Maybe she's planning to use him the same way she did Alma, to farm the traces of dark matter in him until there's enough to condemn a whole new group of third exorcists and he turns into a fucking akuma and they repeat this entire disgusting farce. If he does end up like that, she won't get away again.

"Better, before you showed up," he says, even though that's a lie. He hurts all over, in a strange way he can't quite describe— a slow, subtle burn instead of a breathless moment of agony, a way he doesn't think he's ever hurt before. And he's dizzy; he closes his eyes and tries to reorient himself so he can go back to glaring at Epstein until she drops dead or at least goes away and leaves him alone. When he opens them again, though, he realizes why looking around is so sickening.

"I suppose it's too much to hope for that you'll stay in bed and stop trying to rip the needle out of your arm if we untie you," Epstein says, and it's not a question. He's not a fucking baby anymore and he's not her fucking _experiment_ anymore and she's got no right not to give him the choice. But even as much as he hates her for that, he can't stare her down because he's too busy looking around her at every other inch of the room. They've got to be here somewhere, they're always around somewhere even if it's just at the edges of his peripheral vision.

_He can see the floor_.

There are no flowers, not anywhere. He can feel bed linens under him, not flower petals, and he can smell antiseptic and blood and everything but a cloying, rotting sweetness.

"What the hell is going on here," is how he answers her. It's doesn't really come out as a question, either. "You did something."

"No," she says. She's a good liar; it almost sounds sincere.

"Then why aren't I _better_ already?" The _drip-drip-drip_ is coming from whatever they're putting into him with the needle he hadn't noticed until she mentioned it. Now that he knows it's there he can feel it, but before that it had been just another part of that nebulous, new pain that won't _go away_. "What, you need a replacement to get your fucking dark matter and I'm the only one left who can do it?" If she hadn't learned back when Alma had slaughtered her parents (like Bak Chang and every person with a little bit of fucking sense had) or when Alma had managed to transform all of her pet third exorcists into gibbering piles of akuma flesh (when even people with no fucking sense should have learned), then she would never learn.

Now that he knows where the noise is coming from, it sounds familiar. Still irritating, but in a familiar kind of way, something he can remember being kept awake by. If the thought wasn't so completely and totally ludicrous, he might call it reassuring— something he knows is _his_ memory, something that's happened to him and not in some half-remembered life belonging to someone else. It's pain and death, but pain and death are what he knows. There's something to be said for the devil you know, and Order hospital rooms are the devils he knows far better than he'd like.

"You _can't_ do it, Kanda," she says. "That's just it. When the Earl said he would end it— don't you remember what happened?"

_I can end this right now, if you let the Fourteenth out._

"Walker, you fucking _didn't_," he says, as if Allen Walker were right there to hear him. He doesn't remember what Epstein is talking about, not really— he remembers fighting with Alma, being told that the entire mess is his fault just for _wanting to live_, but after that everything is a blank except for those fuzzy recollections of trying to get out of bed and being tied down.

"He did," she says. "The dark matter in your body is gone, just like in Alma's and the third exorcists's bodies. You're not regenerating anymore."

He would call her a liar, except that he still isn't hurting any less— and when he looks down as best he can with his arms and legs strapped to the bed, he can't see a black mark anywhere on his chest. That's just like Allen fucking Walker, too, sacrificing the big picture to save one person. What the hell has he ever done to deserve that? He's been trying to make Walker hate him for so long that it doesn't make any sense. Not even Lenalee would have done something so goddamn _stupid_. At least, he hopes she wouldn't have.

_That's_ why it feels so strange— he's never been hurt long enough to really ache before. Even when he'd been laid up for weeks after he fought that Noah, it had been nothing but _exhaustion_. His body had been so busy regenerating he had no energy left for anything else; it hadn't been painful after the first few hours. But now he knows for the first time what it means to feel battered and sore, to have a reminder of what's happened that won't fade away in a quarter of an hour.

"The others?" He doesn't give a damn about the third exorcists— monsters, all of them, and that means something coming from _him_— but he has to know about Alma. Mercy-killing the only friend he'd ever had once had been the most awful experience of his life, doing it twice had been even worse, and he's honestly not sure he could do it a third time. He's never been a praying man, but just then he's almost willing to pray that he had succeeded and killed Alma.

"Most of them are dead," Epstein says. "They were too far gone; they died when you killed Alma Karma and broke the connection between them. There was one survivor— she was inside a barrier when it happened, and it mitigated some of the damage."

Barrier— probably the one who'd been with Howard Link, the girl. There weren't too many other Crow members that powerful who weren't third exorcists themselves, so Link must have been the one who'd cast the barrier. He doesn't know her name, but he can place her face if he thinks about it.

"Good," he says, and he's not talking about that girl surviving. Alma is finally free of this fucking experiment, even if _he's_ still strapped down in a hospital room with Renee Epstein looking on. He won't have to clean up their mess a third time.

Now he'll just have to clean up Walker's.

"When you're more stable, we'll need to run some tests," she says, and those words coming from her in that order are some of the only things that can really, honestly make him nervous. He's not afraid of Renee Epstein. He's _not_. She's one person and if he weren't strapped to this fucking bed he could get past her without even trying. He's laughed in the face of things so much worse. "If you'll let us."

And that's just like them, to wait until he can't get up to pretend he has any kind of choice in the matter. The only thing missing is some machine even more terrifying than the ominous one already here, the one that if he asks she'll claim is just monitoring his vital signs. He doesn't trust that, though, not for a second; machines in his hospital rooms only have one purpose, and it's not a good one. Well, and the spine-breaking _pain_ that comes along with whatever they've decided is the best way to try and force him into synchronizing, but there's no reason for that anymore. And why would they need that, when he's got dozens of small hurts driving him _crazy?_ There are too many of them to keep track of, too many for him to go through and catalogue how long he'll be laid up.

Not that he knows anymore, anyway.

"What's there to test?" Probably nothing, she just _likes_ doing this to people. "Your goddamn experiment's over. _Over, do you hear me?_ There's nothing left for you to figure out."

"I don't think you understand," she says. "We can't afford to have Allen Walker giving secrets about the Order to the Noah. You, Kanda, are the only person we know of who has _ever_ killed a Noah. I think even you can figure out what that means."

_Even you_. She thinks he's an idiot. Well, two can play at that game.

"Are you stupid?" He asks, and her retaliation is to take a needle— when did she get that out?— and stab it into the inside of his arm, just above the elbow. She's drawing blood, and for some reason— maybe the sudden acute awareness of how much every inch of his skin aches right about now— he's very, very aware of the needle. "You know how I won? I _got back up every time he killed me_."

That's what makes him realize that everything he knows now is useless— how he's grown used to fighting, what he brings to the table on a mission, _everything_. He's been Kanda who can't die, who can't be infected and turned into an akuma, who can kill Skin Boric and live to tell about it. Now he isn't; now he's Kanda who isn't used to having to dodge, Kanda who's going to forget one of these days that he can't take the hit. He's a _liability_.

Well, if he turns into an akuma away from here he's _still_ coming for Epstein's fucking face. Especially with how vicious she is when she pulls the needle out; his arm doesn't close after the metal leaves his flesh and he can feel the blood starting to well up and drip down his arm. She tapes gauze over it before she answers him.

"We'll see," she says, and that's not even an answer at all. "Do you need a painkiller?"

And Yuu, who _never_ feels the need to laugh about anything and can count the number of times in his entire life he has done so on one hand, laughs at her. He can't help it; he's laughing so hard that the bed shakes and there are tears in his eyes. And he can't _stop_, even though this is certainly the least funny conversation he's had with anyone in a very, very long time.

"You—" he manages to gasp out between harsh, sobbing bursts of laughter. "After everything— you ask me that _now?_" Maybe he'd be a better person now if someone had asked that ten years ago. And if she's offering that, something he would have never even gotten consideration for before, he must be a person now— no dark matter, no visions of someone else's memory, nothing.

She leaves, and it's a long time before he can calm down enough to consider what he'll do now.

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

Drip. Drip. Drip.

First he'll have to figure out how to stop that _noise_. It's almost too familiar, and if he lets that vague, comforting irritation lull him then he'll let go of what's important _now_. He's glad that all he could do about Epstein's afterthought of an offer had been laugh, because he needs to think— he has one other advantage that she doesn't even know about, and maybe that will help. He's stood and looked that Noah right in the eyes, been inches away and staring right at him when the Noah had gone and the exorcist was back. Maybe, _maybe_, there's something there that will make him useful again. Too bad he's not the one-eyed idiot; he'd always had a good memory for details.

There's _obviously_ something wrong with him, if he's wishing— even briefly, even for good reason, even only in his own head— that he could be anything like _that_ waste of space. First there are no more flowers, then he laughs, and now he's thinking such stupid things— it's like his head isn't his own anymore. Or, both likelier and _scarier_, it's that his head is his own for the first time and this is how the real Yuu is.

God, he hopes not. The real Yuu is kind of awful, if that's how he really is.

He's all but resigned himself to the fact that the beeping won't stop short of getting up and ripping the machine right out of the wall, and that's something he can't accomplish in his current state. Even if he _weren't_ tied down, he's not sure he would be able to summon up that kind of strength right now. Not with how much everything _everywhere_ hurts. And the dripping, well, he's undecided about that. On one hand, he probably _could_ manage to get that needle out if he tried hard enough, but then it would probably drip all over the floor and make even more noise. Besides, there's always the chance— however small and unlikely it is— that he actually does need whatever they're giving him, since he's not healing on his own. And if they figure out he can get the needle out while he's tied down, they'll probably drug him without asking first.

_Fuck_. He's stuck with them _both_, which means he can't concentrate. And he can't sleep, either, because his back hurts and he can't turn over onto his side. Not that it would help; his sides hurt, too. All he can do is stare up at the ceiling and count the tiles, and wonder at the fact he's actually seeing what's there and not what he doesn't even remember.

He's still not going to ask for her painkillers.


End file.
